Re: Fw: Re: junior-programming
On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 06:37:04PM +0100, Ailbhe Leamy wrote:
> I started with BASIC when I was 6 years old. Seemed like an excellent
> beginners language to me at the time. Still does. It was very easy to
> produce something that made "sense" in English and that produced a
> definite result. IIRC, I more or less started by making a Choose Your
> Own Adventure book into a BASIC game.
Well, there will always be reports like this of fond childhood memories of
BASIC. I have a few of my own. :)
> However, my experience of other languages is very very limited. I just
> thought an opinion might be useful to somebody...
The trouble is that seasoned programmers have come to know and hate
BASIC's faults. We cannot in good conscience recommend BASIC, knowing the
excellent alternatives there are to it. It is not so much that BASIC is
impossible for children to learn. Clearly that is not the case. But it
BASIC encourages all kinds of bad habits. Better to start budding young
programmers on better designed languages. And in any event, two of the
languages we have selected that I do know (Logo and Python ... I haven't
used Scheme before) are, in my estimation, easier to learn than BASIC as
well.
What I'm trying to say is, I think there is a sentimental attachment that
forms around BASIC because we look back to the days when it was included
in the ROMs of our very first PCs. Looking at it objectively, and in
particular, comparing BASIC with the alternatives, I think we will find
that there is now no longer a reason to teach BASIC to children.
Ben
--
nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca
Debian http://www.debian.org synrg@debian.org
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